Thursday, June 30, 2016

The Latest Leak from Guccifer 2.0 Goes Unnoticed by Media

As of 2 p.m. EST, a Google search for news on the latest Guccifer 2.0 leak returned just three results:

1) "Clinton hacker teases identity and calls Snowden and Assange heroes" (from International Business Times UK);
2) "DNC Hacker Denies Russian Link, Says Attack Was His 'Personal Project'" (from Motherboard); and
3) "Dem party hacker answers skeptics on nationality, politics" (from The Hill).

Please note that all three headlines accurately signal the purpose of the articles, which is to focus on the identity of Guccifer 2.0 instead of analyzing the information he leaked. (Note also that since Guccifer 2.0 identified himself as a male in his latest blog post, I will no longer use gender-ambiguous pronouns such as s/he to refer to him.)

Televised coverage of the latest leak from Guccifer 2.0 appears to be non-existent here in the U.S., and high-profile corporate print media outlets are staying mute.

It's almost as if CrowdStrike is suddenly as adept at controlling the national media as the Clinton machine has been for years. Weird.

So now seems like an opportune time to share the wisdom of a purported "professional penetration tester" named Nathan McGinty who commented on a sloppy article that Cory Doctorow churned out for BoingBoing immediately following the appearance of the Guccifer 2.0 blog. Near the middle of his lengthy comment, McGinty observes:
However, it is important to remember that a company such as CrowdStrike -- or Mandiant, with Sony -- a big gun, serves multiple roles in such an incident. First is to prevent further damage. Second is to gather evidence and gain attribution. Third is PR and damage control. The third job of CrowdStrike can at times be orthogonal to the public truth. Nowhere in their job description is included the public truth. There is no penalty (that I am aware of) for them to disclose a non-truth or shade the truth. Heck there's almost no penalty for a politician to do so, and they are ostensibly called upon to serve such a thing as the public truth. [Emphasis added.]
Either my Google-fu is weak or Nathan McGinty is a more common name than you might expect. But for whatever reason, I have been unable to contact Mr. McGinty to confirm his expertise or request further analysis concerning the DNC hack. (Unfortunately, comments on the Doctorow article are now locked, so I can't simply reply to McGinty's remarks.)

Whether McGinty is an expert pen tester or not, the fact remains that the DNC, the Clinton media machine, and CrowdStrike all share jobs that "can at times be orthogonal to the public truth." Since Clinton and the Democrats routinely push for war and Shawn Henry of CrowdStrike routinely uses scare-and-sell tactics to promote his approach to cyberdefense for "the homeland," we should all be wary of these articles that focus on whether Guccifer 2.0 is really a Russian spy or not. Even when the articles leave that question up in the air, they frame the discussion in such a way that Russian cyberespionage remains the central topic.
 
Obviously, the central topic of the Guccifer 2.0 discussion should be the materials he leaked. And that's the one topic that the DNC, the Clintons, and CrowdStrike all have a vested interest in burying, as they're doing right now with a little help from their friends in the corporate media.



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